Since her accession sixty-three years earlier, she had been a reassuringly constant presence in an ever-changing world. A dignified but unglamorous figure barely five feet tall, she was a creature of habit with an aversion to show. More comfortable wearing a bonnet than a crown, she personified the values – solidity, sobriety, propriety – of the era to which she gave her name. The majority of her subjects could remember no other monarch.
